#para:who i'm not

[the-m3chanic]

who i’m not || solo

Summary: Iron Man is called to complete a routine rescue mission, saving passengers from a crashing plane. It should be easy. Unfortunately, his alter ego, Tony Stark, had been drinking when the call came in.

Tw: alcoholism, death, vomit, just a general dolloping of guilt.

-

Rhodes came over for lunch around two, pulling Tony out of the workshop and away from his very pressing repairs to Robodog, a.k.a. Buster. Over his French toast, Tony could tell that his best friend was giving him The Look. It said that he was in deep all over again, that Rhodes could tell he was so far down the rabbit hole that he was buried under the weight of everything he had forced himself to carry.

Tony asked Rhodes if he had anywhere else to go. His best friend got the hint. He mentioned something about a dinner. As Tony watched the figure retreat from the Tower, he wondered if he was on his way to eat with Potts, or any of the other Avengers, or maybe some of his old military buddies. Tony reached for his phone, scrolling down through the contacts, and by the time he reached the end of the list, he had already decided who he would be spending his night with: a bottle of the nicest bourbon this side of the Pacific, and more than a few shot glasses.

Drinking alone was something he was intimately familiar with. Since he was fifteen years old, he had locked himself away in his room and poured glass after glass after glass, before he reached the stage where his hands shook so hard he had to just gulp from the bottle, vodka trailing into his hair, leaving it sticky when he tried to wash the sins away in the shower the next morning. Before Afghanistan, he would’ve drank so much his mouth went numb. He would’ve grabbed a model on the way out, maybe a couple, and bring them back to his mansion, enthralled them with tales of his many eccentric moments, and then stumbled out of bed the moment they were done and the other person had drifted off to sleep.

Now, though, it was just him. He wasn’t going to drag anybody else into this mess. He was selfish, but he wasn’t a complete dickhead. At least, he liked to imagine he wasn’t. At that thought, he switched back to whiskey. Nothing worked quite as well, even if it did leave him smelling like a bar for his meeting the next morning. Maybe he could postpone it. Pepper could come up with some excuse for him … but that would mean her cleaning up his messes. Tony had long since relied on her for that. She had her own problems. (He was most of them.)

Ty had shown up a couple of weeks ago, left him a message on the machine that he had a letter from Tony’s mother, left to him after her death. Tony had been avoiding the meeting quite neatly, and an alien invasion, if nothing else, gave him an excuse. Nonetheless, it lingered in the back of his mind, yet another thread he had left untied, another regret he had yet to work through.

(Liquor burned as it ran down his throat, but it made his stomach warm, his heart heavy. It was a welcome distraction; the love of his life, as depressing as it was to admit.)

He had promised Jessica he would go to a meeting, or as close to promising as he allowed himself. In his heart of hearts, he never imagined he would actually go through with it, but he had. Tony found himself in the basement of a church along with a bunch of other washed up celebrities and former child stars, people who had been raised in the blinding light of fame and cameras and constant press, and he had said the words that had been sticking in his mouth since he was in college, or even before that:

“My name is Tony Stark, and I am an alcoholic.”

He said it once, and it settled on him like the earth upon Atlas’ shoulders. All the myths he had read about people holding up great and immeasurable weight suddenly made sense, suddenly grew in magnitude. His father, a man so inherently transfixed with the notion of strength, must have come to the same realisation.

Repeating it like a mantra in the mirror made it easier to detach himself from those words. I am Tony Stark, and I am an alcoholic. Tony Stark, twenty-four hours sober. Tony Stark, an hour sober. Tony Stark, a drunk. Yinsen had called it a dependency, but it was more than that. It was poison seeping through every cell in his body, poisoning his thoughts, slowing his projects to a halt.

0600 hours was when the message came through. FRIDAY brought a holographic screen in front of Tony’s face as he lay, sprawled out on the sofa. She had long since learnt not to speak when he was a litre bottle down.

MISSION REQUEST FOR STARK, ANTHONY EDWARD. RESCUE OP. PLANE ENGINES FAILED. CURRENLTY DESCENDING RAPIDLY. SEVEN PASSENGERS, PLUS THE PILOT. IMMEDIATE RESPONSE REQUIRED.

FRIDAY hummed in the walls. Clearly, she wished to give her opinion.

“Hit me with it,” Tony said, but he’d already sent word of acceptance. He pushed himself up off the sofa, and bashed his shin against the glass coffee table as he did so. “Fuck.”

“Boss, this mission has a 19% chance of success.”

“Higher than most.” His words were slurred, even to his own ears, but he continued, hissing at the pain in his leg, as he walked towards the landing pad. The brisk New York air whipped around him, hitting him immediately in the face, allowing him to take a deep, sharp breath. The taste of alcohol was biting in his mouth, sitting thick on his tongue, but he held his hands out, allowing the suit to envelop him.

Tony Stark could be sick in the morning. Right now, Iron Man was going to save some lives.

“FRIDAY!” Tony said, blinking a few times inside the mask. His head was spinning. The AI was bright and blinding, causing him to wince. “Get me the coordinates of the plane.”

“Coordinates implanted, sir. Fifty point two miles away. Would you like me to draft a rescue plan?”

“Nah, I’ll wing it.” Knowing from previous experience, FRIDAY would come up with the safest plan known to man, based on all of the calculations and science that she could throw at it, and Tony would ignore it five minutes in with a crazy idea that ended up working better. Improvisation was the key to success, and he was a genius. A genius with a near perfect record, something he brought up any time the government questioned his manning of the suits, a record that helped him sleep at night on the rare occasions he could actually close his eyes.

The suit streaked across the sky. FRIDAY, as always, brought up recordings from the street cameras below showing people pointing up to the clouds, early joggers in the park and couples stumbling home from a night on the town alike grinning and snapping pictures of Iron Man to put on their Snapchats. Usually, Tony would wave, or do a loop in the air, or play a little for the public, but he was too busy trying to keep his lunch firmly in his stomach, trying to make his head stop repeating drink drink drink drink drink.

He arrived just as the plane began to crash down through the cloud cover. People down on the ground began screaming; it pierced through his brain, made him pause for the briefest of moments until FRIDAY interrupted him.

“Plane, boss,” she said, her tone reading like she was reminding him of something, and Tony laughed, a weird, strained sound in the back of his throat.

“I didn’t forget, sweetheart.” Calculations came up in the helmet. “Run in the Rosenburg law … no.” The plane was going too fast for him to catch, even with the strength of the suit. He could try to repair the engine, get them up and flying again, but it sounded like a blow-out, judging by the amount of smoke billowing out the back and the incessant screeching. It would take too damn long. There was no salvaging the plane. He had to cut into it.

“Get me a list of passengers!” Tony said.

“Boss-”

“Now!”

A list of passengers came up in the screen. Seven businesspeople from Tokyo, coming to a conference about the Accords and the Skrull invasion. Experts in their field. Important people, Tony thought to himself, the kind his father would put above the others. He didn’t work on that principle.

Tony put full power behind his rocket boosters, flying directly for the plane. “Boss, I need to tell you-”

“I’m working right now!” Tony said through gritted teeth. His vision was blurry. His head was pounding. Every time he moved, his limbs felt like they were made of stone. The suit, once intuitive, felt cumbersome. Where it was once his mode of invincibility, it now felt like a liability. As he got close to the plane, trying to gulp back a yell at the powerful air current trying to force him away from the door, he reached out and grabbed onto the side of it, the metal crumpling under his fist.

Even through the mask, Tony could taste the fire whipping through the air mere metres from his face. He pulled himself forward, placing his feet on the wings, holding on tightly with one hand as he angled the other one towards the door. The laser burned through the side of the plane easily, and just before the door came off, Tony flew over to it and gently removed it, allowing it to drop down into the ocean below instead of whipping off and causing more damage to the left balance – though in retrospect, it was off already. When did it come off?

He stepped into the plane, being greeted with seven passengers, all neatly accounted for, with oxygen masks on and parachutes strapped to their backs -  at least, five of them did. Tony counted another couple of times and got different answers for each one. He was Tony Goddamn Stark, why was he messing up counting below ten? Finally, FRIDAY piped up.

“Five have chutes, boss.”

Ah. Right the first time.

“Iron Man!” one of the ladies – a Cho Fong, allegiances to Fujikawa Industries, a fact that might have made him feel drunker than anything else – exclaimed.

“That’s me,” Tony said, holding up his hands. “Okay, everyone stay calm.” He thought for a moment. “I’m going to take the five of you with chutes out and away from the current of the plane. You can then drop down to the harbour, and there’ll be Iron Legion automated soldiers there to help you out.”

Everyone nodded eagerly, and in a swell, the five with parachutes came swarming towards Tony. “All of you hold hands,” he said, remembering a time when this had worked well before, and he had been a hero, the saviour of the day, the Golden Avenger … “Don’t let go, or it won’t go well.”

The group nodded grimly, and with that, Tony backed out of the airplane, allowing the current to hit his back first and disperse as the group crowded together. He shot back out of the plane, keeping a careful grip of everyone even as their sweaty hands slipped, and waited until the distance he calculated as safe before letting go. He didn’t hesitate before going back into the plane.

“The first group have all landed safely in the harbour,” FRIDAY supplemented, a minute or so later. God, the plane was further down than he thought. “Boss, I need to say this-”

“Don’t need help, FRIDAY,” Tony replied, stepping back into the plane. The two people were elderly gentlemen, who looked less terrified of their impending doom and more accepting. (Tony wished he didn’t understand that.)

Tony moved over, the suit whirring as he walked, and hooked his arms under the two men. “Your necks will hurt tomorrow,” he said, rather apologetic, glad that the mask could be blamed for the slur in his voice rather than the liquor. His head was fuzzy, but there was a euphoria there, an adrenaline buzzing. Heroism, that was what it was. Iron Man was the one good thing he had ever done in his life, and he was constantly proving that. Tony Stark could mess up every day in multiple ways, but Iron Man rarely did. He always saved the day.

“Mr. Stark,” one of the men said. Tony turned to look at him. CEO of a tech conglomerate he had never heard of, probably recently founded. Or perhaps not so recently – he hadn’t been keeping up particularly well, lately. “Cho, my daughter – is she safe?”

“Don’t worry, sir,” Tony replied. “My assistant informed me that your daughter reached the ground. She’s waiting for you now.”

The man thanked him profusely, and Tony took that as his moment to blast out of the plane doors, clutching the two men tightly as they made their way down to the ground, spiralling so as to preserve their eardrums. He set them down on the harbour, and watched with a smile as Cho, soaking wet, ran forward and flung herself into her father’s arms. Her father, clearly taken aback, nonetheless smiled and held his sobbing daughter, running his hand down her hair.

The second man without a parachute turned just as Tony raised his hand to wave at the cheering crowd, phones flashing and cameras shuttering.

“Where’s Ying?” he asked, eyes wide.

Tony’s hand slowly lowered. His head throbbed. He thought through the list of passengers, counted them on the harbour. There were seven, all here, all accounted for.

“Ying?” he repeated.

“The pilot!”

Tony was up off the ground before his drunken mind could think to do it, but when his targeting system locked on the plane, it was mere seconds from crashing into the water.

Before it made contact, Tony knew what would happen.

The engine, overheating since they began to crash, would finally give up. The flames that came from the cockpit would meet the jet fuel. It would explode. Tony knew the sequence of events, had heard Rhodes talk about it a million and one times in the air force. He knew the science, knew all the equations, knew what would happen.

He watched as the plane, a beat before hitting the water, burst into flames.

The crowd cheered. They didn’t know. The passengers clapped their hands to their mouths. Cho buried her face in her father’s shoulder and let out a howling cry.

Tony landed once more, hard enough that the wood of the walkway splintered. “I’m-” He turned frantically to the seven. He thought about what FRIDAY had been trying to tell him. He thought about the original message. He thought about how much he couldn’t think right now, how much he was going to throw up when he got home, how he wouldn’t sleep for a month.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Behind the mask, he couldn’t even cry. He couldn’t even think. This would all be a bad dream – he would wake up in the morning, and it would be a dream brought around by the alcohol. A nightmare of a worst-case scenario. After all, Tony Stark was the alcoholic. Iron Man was untouchable, invincible. “I’m … I’m so sorry.”

One of the other women stepped forward. She reached to touch the metal of his suit. Tony blasted off towards the Tower before she had the chance.

The crowd below him chanted.

“Iron Man! Iron Man! Iron Man!”

Only the passengers knew.

*

When Tony woke up the next morning, he wanted a drink. He wanted to pretend like it hadn’t happened. News reports blared through. Iron Man saved passengers from a plane crash! Only one casualty! Tony flicked the channel over to where the pilot’s family talked about him.

Ying had three daughters. Triplets. They were three years old. He had a husband, a small but stocky man who looked as if the world had been broken under his feet. One casualty out of eight – to anyone else it would be good.

Tony knew better. He knew that man’s death, that husband’s death, that father’s death was avoidable.

The next morning, he wanted a drink. Instead, he went into the bathroom and threw up. It felt like he spent hours against the bathroom tiles, the marble harsh and unforgiving on his knees.

When Jessica arrived later on that day, he was still hanging over the toilet, and his hands were shaking so hard he felt like it was 1989 all over again.

“I let him die,” he said to her, and he threw up.

He had promised, almost a decade ago, to make up for his mistakes. He wanted to save the world, protect it from men like who he used to be. He would give his every breath for it.

Tony Stark might have been an alcoholic, but Iron Man couldn’t be, not anymore.

He guessed this was as good a time as any to start.